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Authorities take action over the rats of Montecristo
16/01/2012
The Mediterranean island of Montecristo is to be bombarded with pellets of rat poison, as authorities try to eradicate the plague of rats that is threatening the island's valuable nature reserve.
The island, which was immortalised by the novelist Alexandre Dumas as the location of some lost buried treasure, has seen black rats invade and multiply since they were first introduced as stowaways from boats a few years ago.
Authorities are now planning to drop some 26 tonnes of poison pellets on the island - which lies between Tuscany and Corsica - at the end of this month, in the hope of bringing down their numbers. It is thought that there is currently one rat for every square yard of the four-square-mile island.
Franca Zanichelli, the director of the national park authority that governs the island, said that it will not be an indiscriminate attack on the wildlife and that great measures are being taken to make sure the poison only appeals to the rats, and not the thousands of indigenous birds that live there.
"No one wants to poison the island," Zanichelli said. "The project will be managed by experts. The poison pellets are similar to those used everywhere to kill rats."
Similar operations have proven successful on the nearby islands of Giannutri and Sardinia, and have been carried out in New Zealand and on islands in the South Atlantic.
